Philosophy of the Performing Arts

the nature of the performable work 31
grizzlies. We don’t think that a creature that is incapable of growling cannot
count as a grizzly at all. Similarly, when we say that T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land starts with the words “April is the cruelest month,” we mean that well-
formed, or correct, copies of the poem start with these words. If I have a copy
of a text that departs from the standard text of the poem only in beginning
with the words “April is the cruelest moth,” I still have a copy of The Waste
Land , albeit an incorrect one, if this textual feature is the result of problems
arising in an attempt to print out Eliot’s poem. (Matters would be different
if this were a feature of a correct printing of a work by a previously unknown
lepidopterist-poet who happened independently upon a verbal structure dif-
fering from Eliot’s only in this respect ...)
Let us take stock of what we have established thus far. Performable works,
by definition, are fully appreciable only through their performances. There
may be many different performances that fully qualify for the appreciation
of such works – the works may have multiple work-instances, as we have
defined that term. As we have now seen, if performed works are taken to be
norm-types, they also by their very nature admit of incorrect performances.
Incorrect performances fail, by definition, to fully qualify for the experiential
role in the appreciation of the performable work of which they are perform-
ances, and will not count as work-instances in our technical sense. Thus not
all performances of a performable work will be among its work-instances.
Which features of a performance bear upon its status as a work-instance of
a performable work, however, depends upon which kinds of features are
prescribed by the performable work for its correct performance – which
features enter into the condition C that defines what it is for something to be
a correct performance of the work. And this is a matter concerning which
there is significant disagreement amongst those writers who take perform-
able works to be norm-types.
This disagreement has a deeper significance if, as seems plausible,^9 we
individuate types according to the conditions they prescribe for their tokens,
or, in the case of norm-types, for their well-formed tokens. The American
five dollar bill and the Canadian five dollar bill are arguably different note-
types in virtue of the different conditions that their tokens must satisfy. The
same would apply to the American five dollar bill and the American one
dollar bill. In the case of norm-types, it seems reasonable to assume that we
have different norm-types when we have different requirements for being a
well-formed token. And, in the case of both ordinary types and norm-types,
it also seems reasonable to think that if there is no difference in the condi-
tions associated with what might appear to be two different types, there is
in fact only a single type for which we have two different labels. This would
apply to the type “Canadian one dollar coin” and the type “Canadian ‘loonie,’ ”
for example. If this is correct, then, if performable works are norm-types,